TAINAN, Taiwan — The police have arrested the builder of a 17-story apartment complex that collapsed in a predawn earthquake on Saturday here in southwestern Taiwan, the city government announced Tuesday afternoon.

Lin Minghui, the developer of the Wei-Guan Golden Dragon building, and two of his associates from the Wei-Guan Construction Company, the business that he used to build the apartment complex, were arrested late Monday night, said Ellen Hsueh, a municipal spokeswoman.

Liu Shih-Chung, one of Tainan’s two deputy secretaries general, said Mr. Lin and his associates had been arrested on suspicion of criminal business misconduct resulting in fatalities.

The arrest of Mr. Lin and his associates is likely to draw considerable attention in mainland China. Poor construction practices by government contractors were widely blamed for the collapse of many schools and the deaths of many children during the Sichuan Province earthquake that killed about 70,000 people and left nearly 18,000 missing in western China in 2008.

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A funeral on Monday for victims of the earthquake in Tainan, Taiwan.CreditTyrone Siu/Reuters

When protests over the schools threatened to spread out of control, the Beijing authorities silenced the criticism and limited judicial actions against the contractors.

Mixing sarcasm with envy of Taiwan’s willingness to hold developers accountable for how their buildings fared in earthquakes, one person wrote on Tuesday night on Chinese social media, “If they did it this way on the mainland, would there be any developers left in China?”

In Tainan, firefighters and other rescue specialists had pulled 39 bodies from the wreckage of the collapsed building, while an additional 99 people were missing and believed to still be under the rubble. Only two other people died from the earthquake in this city of 1.8 million.

The arrest of Mr. Lin, who had disappeared after the collapse, came hours before local officials decided to deploy house-size excavating machines to drill, tug and tear at the huge mounds of debris on the site. Rescuers delayed using the equipment for three days after the earthquake, for fear that the machines might cause the wreckage to subside further, collapsing the tiny cavities in which people are feared to be trapped.

The reason for the delay in using heavy equipment was clear on Tuesday afternoon. As the machinery worked, concrete slabs elsewhere in the wreckage sometimes shook, releasing cascades of pebbles and puffs of dust but not actually tumbling down the sides of the debris field.

In the first days after the earthquake, firefighters and other rescue workers were so careful about disturbing the wreckage that they removed sand and other debris a bucket at a time, passing them along human chains. But progress has been slow. The layers of the collapsed high-rise were so compressed, from hitting the ground at considerable speed, that even power tools could not penetrate the mazes of crushed concrete and steel reinforcing bars.

The use of heavy machinery “is still to try to save people, because the rescuers cannot find a way down into the complex,” Ms. Hsueh said on Tuesday.

The rescue workers paused frequently and used sophisticated sensors in an attempt to find signs of life. When one was detected on Tuesday night, they reduced the use of heavy equipment in that spot and proceeded cautiously, with lighter tools.

The police in Taiwan were quick to locate and arrest Mr. Lin, who was said to have a history of vanishing when his construction projects and other business dealings sour. Lee Kunshan, the City Council member who represents the district where the building collapsed, said in an interview on Monday afternoon that while the developer had been born as Lin Minghui, he had disappeared on four previous occasions and legally changed his name each time before re-emerging with new business ventures.

Mr. Lee, who has known Mr. Lin for his entire life, said it was unclear what the developer’s current legal name was. Ms. Hsueh and Mr. Liu referred to him only as Mr. Lin.

While the first people rescued had minor injuries, those pulled from the shattered remnants of the building more recently were in worse condition.

The National Cheng Kung University Hospital, one of the hospitals treating survivors, received no one who needed to be placed in intensive care in the first 12 hours after the quake. But nine of the 23 patients there on Tuesday were in intensive care, including four children, one of them a 4-month-old boy, said Ko Nai-ying, the associate director of nursing at the hospital.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Builder Arrested in Taiwan After Collapse . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe